A Word on Hiroshima (2)

Here in the village distinguished by the eight pine trees that gave it its name, August is a quiet month. The rice is growing, but not ready for harvest. Nothing is more beautiful than the emerald green of a mature paddy, like the one in the photo, as seen against a cerulean sky. It's hot. A typhoon is on the way--look at the clouds!

The green of the rice and the blue of the sky is the same in August of 2010 as it was in 1945. In the afternoon of August 6, 1945, Toshio S. walked the four kilometers from his house, along a road with rice paddies lining both sides, to the train station in the center of Eight Pines Village. On his back was a small rucksack with a canteen of water, some salted rice balls, and a towel to mop away the sweat that poured from his face.

It was hot. It was quiet. It was just like in the photo, only different.

There was a strange cloud hovering over the city in the far distance, and from that cloud poured black rain. Toshio S. was on his way to Hiroshima City to look for his brother, unaccounted for after leaving his house to go to work in the city center that morning, the day the world's first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima City.

Koichi, Toshio's brother, was one of the lucky ones. He died instantly, pelted by a torrent of broken concrete from what, moments before his death, was his office building. It took two days, but Toshio found Koichi,identified the body, and mourned his brother's loss with the rest of his family.

Not lucky were the men, women, and children whose skin was melted from their bodies by the force of the atomic blast. They had no voices, not even to say their own names. They had no faces, no identifying marks, to let others know who they were. They were alive, but with nothing to hold the fluids inside their bodies, they were tortured by a demonic thirst. And there were so many of them. Too many to be helped by people like Toshio, who had a tin of water he gladly gave away, water that leaked away the moment it was swallowed.

On November 12 this year, a peace conference attended by Nobel Peace Prize Laureates will open in Hiroshima. America's most recent Nobel laureate will be in Yokohama for an economic conference around that same time. He is cordially invited to make the hour flight to Hiroshima and let the world know if his country values peace and human life as much as it does economics.